No longer injured

What I learned over then past 144 days

Ten minutes before my 16-week check-in with my knee surgeon, I was sitting on a bench in the lower level of the orthopedic center, aggressively massaging my knee. I hoped to work out the stiffness and hide the overuse of the past week.

One sign that I am not thriving is Strava posts showing that I’ve spent a lot of time on Zwift. The wildfires have been relentless, Colorado has been inundated with smoke, and I’ve been finding it hard to breathe in my house, let alone go outside. After a crushing grief episode on Thursday, I decided I needed to spend the holiday weekend decompressing. I didn’t want to be around people and their godawful state-torching fireworks. I wanted to escape to the mountains and stay off the Internet. I can’t do much hiking, but even setting up a tent next to my car would be enough. But I can’t breathe in the mountains. I can’t breathe anywhere. Except in my dark, closed-off basement room with my indoor bike and HEPA filter blasting directly in my face.

So I rode 140 virtual miles with more than 11,000 feet of simulated climbing. I tuned into podcasts and turned off my brain for as long as my body would allow. I managed a solid “Ven-Top” — that’s a virtual vertical mile climb on Zwift — with the same wattage I was able to generate earlier this year, before the injury. On Sunday, I decided to do a virtual century. I made it to mile 60 before it was starkly clear that I did not have the fitness to pull this off. And to my credit, I quit. Well, I quit at mile 65, holding out hope longer than was prudent.

Then I was regretful because my knee was sore. The next day, it was more sore, and the AQI was 118. I thought about the choice, if I had to choose — to spend the rest of my life confined to crutches and only able to use my body within those parameters, or to be trapped for life in a place with bad air, unable to go outside, not even to sit in the yard or ride a mobility device down a garden path. It’s a terrible choice, but I think I’d choose the crutches.

But after 16 weeks, I am officially on the other side of my injury. I just needed the surgeon to give me her gold stamp of approval. She tested my extension and flexion, measured my quad circumference, pressed on my kneecap to look for pain (none), and pronounced that I was better. It’s still prudent to be careful with impact and twisting motions, but she encouraged me to keep building — especially the indoor bike on platform pedals. She loved that. She apologized for ruining my summer, and I replied, “You saved my summer. Thank you for your good work.”

(I am really happy with my surgeon. Her name is Dr. Meredith Mayo, if you are ever in the Boulder area and need a knee reconstruction.)

As I moved through my first injury-free day, I thought about a few of the lessons I’ve taken away from the past 144. They’re not the usual feel-good platitudes and affirmations; they’re simply a few truths that I found.

We are alone in our pain

Pain, like love, is something we universally experience, yet we cannot know anyone else's experience of it. There probably isn’t a person alive who hasn’t been through something — a physical injury, a breakup, the death of a loved one, etc. — and not thought, “This is the worst anyone has ever felt. If other people felt this way, humanity wouldn’t survive; we couldn’t endure it.” And yet, we persist.

February 13 to March 15 was one of the most challenging months of my life, possibly only topped by the weeks after my dad died. These were the dates between my initial injury and my surgery. They do not include anything usually considered hard: The surgery itself, the six weeks of non-weight-bearing recovery, and the long 10 weeks of learning to walk, etc., after that. Those weren’t cake, but they weren’t February.

It was the pain. The constant, throbbing, sharpened soreness with the occasional electrical shock of nerve pain radiating through my leg. I’d lie awake at night and cry until I could release enough of the pain to sleep, only to wake up again an hour later with new throbbing. I would have given anything to take the pain away. Opioids? Yes please. No one gave them to me; probably a good thing. But I might have agreed to have my leg cut off in some of my worst moments. I’d beg Beat to do it and be partially serious. I learned through this injury that I am not strong.

I was perplexed that I could not find anyone who cared enough to try to help me. I had to make my initial appointment crying and blubbering incomprehensibly at an AI assistant for Boulder Orthopedics. Then I was told to wait five days for an MRI, which I only bumped up by agreeing to pay out of pocket. Then I was told to wait nearly a month for surgery. A month of that pain that served no purpose. I wasn’t healing; I was only waiting and suffering.

Of course, this is life. I am not special. I don’t get special treatment. I am privileged to have access to any medical care at all, let alone the excellent care I ultimately received. I understand that. But as I crutched through that month, not yet certain that the surgery could cure me and not getting remotely better in four weeks, I found a level of peace with my pain. I learned how to sit with it in quiet moments, how to move around it as I breathed, how to look for beauty through the hateful haze that hung over everything.

If you’ve ever lived for any period of time with chronic pain, you might understand. But of course, I can’t understand your pain.

The people who love you will be there

Just over a week before my surgery, my little sister flew out from California just to be with me. I didn’t “need” the help. Beat was home from Alaska by then. I had gotten fairly adept at daily life on crutches. But she arrived at the Denver airport with specialty chocolate chips to make cookies. She insisted on getting anything I needed so she didn’t have to see me crutching with a grocery bag slung around my neck. We spent a day crutching around downtown Boulder on a gorgeous, warm March afternoon, and it was my favorite day during a very long period of tedium and grind.

My other little sister and my mom flew out from Utah a week later and were invaluable in helping me through surgery and those first hard days when I was much more helpless than I expected to be. Mom stayed a full ten days. Friends checked in regularly by e-mail. Beat provided much-needed levity and perspective when I was in the midst of a doom spiral and begging for a mercy killing. Gestures of love are often the one bright spot when we’re going through hard times.

Life’s greatest challenges are not a choice

There was a time when I looked to adventurers and athletes for inspiration, people pushing the limits of human experience and endurance. But as my perspective shifted through this injury, it became more difficult to look past the hubris and egocentrism that accompany these pursuits. While writhing through those painful nights, I regarded my past endurance-racing self with contempt — the frivolity of senseless risk, the audacity of choosing pain. What a circus!

For perspective, I looked to essays and books written by people living with disabilities, people living with chronic pain, people dying of cancer. It’s not light reading and arguably not the best way out of a doom spiral. But these are the people whom I view as life’s true warriors, quietly chipping away at challenges that make “the world’s toughest race” look like hopscotch on a playground.

My perspective had already started to shift while I watched my friend Betsy die of a glioblastoma last July. Living with my own blessedly temporary bout of chronic pain and disability only deepened this view. We can only know the measure of ourselves when life puts us to the test — a real test, not some game we dreamed up. And I’m not saying the game is wrong. I’m just saying that I saw more in these dark corners of the soul than I ever could high on a mountain or deep in the tundra. I learned that I am not strong, not like the others. But I’ve been gifted the opportunity to keep trying.

There are no comebacks, only steps forward

The truth is, I had been considering giving up trail running before this injury. I’ve just taken so many falls over the years. As I get older, the risk becomes greater. The last fall I took was in December. I was running a smooth singletrack trail, uphill, not even fast. The skidding splat tore open the top of my right knee. The cut is now a scar that matches my surgery scars in tone, only larger and more jagged. My legs and arms are riddled with scars. I have taken steps to address my clumsiness. An especially painful sternum-crushing fall in 2022 is the reason I took up weight training. I completed an eight-week ankle strengthening class and still try to do the exercises as part of my routine. I had a running gait analysis done — I’m pigeon-toed and a toe striker — but I haven’t been able to do a lot with the insights. (The pigeon-toed thing could explain why I tore my left medial meniscus in a step that wasn’t even a fall in February.)

So I am bad at running. But also, I love running. And sometimes, everything comes together to generate such a powerful flow state that I’m willing to do anything it takes to get back there. January 31 was one of those days. I participated in a 50-mile race in Moab, Utah. It was a bad idea because I’d been recovering from frostbite for a month, and that was after the December splat had already upended my training. The race was almost entirely on sand and slickrock, technical terrain where I am emphatically untalented. The 12-hour cutoff demanded a constant running pace, not something I could walk in if I had a bad day. And I pulled it off. It was incredible; I was riding a fairy cloud of flow the entire time without a single stumble. I left that race thinking I can damn well do anything I want. I threw my name in the lottery for the Tor des Geants, a genuinely insane 200-mile mountain race during which I injured myself quite badly (in a fall) in 2014. TdG was beyond my capacity when I was in my prime. But 2026 was going to be my year. I could feel it. I was strong. I was excited. And then, two weeks later …

I don’t know if I will run again. There are a lot of ways I can injure myself that aren’t running, but if I have to endure another 144 days of what I just endured because I caught my foot on a rock and twisted my other knee … well, mercy killing is still on the table.

My surgeon told me that she doesn’t encourage return-to-run protocols until her patients have built equal strength in their surgical leg. I told her I’m still taking baby steps to get back to real hiking, that my proprioception is still jumbled, so running feels a long way away. The official advice I got from her is to keep biking as much as I want, slowly build up my hiking mileage, and start a return-to-run protocol once all of that feels fully back to normal.

I may take longer than that. I intend to sit with my doubt and uncertainty rather than bottle it up, and to be truly honest with myself about where running fits in my long-term desires. As the memory of the pain fades, running might start to feel closer. But I’ve accepted that it will never be the same.

What I am doing is moving forward, one step at a time. And I’m so grateful that I can.